Archives for August 2014

When you are in the middle of something, you don’t always notice how it looks from the outside. I have to keep reminding myself of this fact, as I talk to people about the possibilities of mobile photography in conjunction with the Expanding Vision exhibition. Most people don’t know that you can make art with a smartphone. Most people don’t realize that they have this amazing creative device in their pockets. We get so wrapped up in our little world, talking and working with others doing the same thing, that we forget that most people don’t know what we are doing in this mobile phtoography world.

And so it’s fun, really fun, to get to be part of showing them.

Yesterday I was interviewed by the Corvallis Gazette-Times newspaper as part of a story on the exhibition and mobile photography. I got to talk about my experience with mobile photography, how the idea for the exhibition came about and what I learned from my view from the “inside” of an exhibition. Even though almost none of that was part of it in the end, it was a fun experience and a very nice article! You can read it here.

Oregon Art Beat also came to Corvallis to film a piece on the exhibition. Unfortunately I didn’t get to meet them – I couldn’t get away from my day job – but I look forward to seeing the piece. I’ll post that link when it’s available, too.

AND… we’ve added another date for the Intro to Mobile Photography workshop in conjunction with the exhibition. It will be on Saturday, September 20 and registration is here. The first class was last Saturday and I had 12 lovely participants, who are all taking the excitement for mobile photography back home with them! This three-hour class is a great way to get started playing around with your mobile device camera.

Finally, today is the Brown Bag Art Talk for the Expanding Vision exhibition at The Arts Center, 700 SW Madison in Corvallis. I’ll be there! Come and talk mobile photography with a number of the artists in the show. It should be fun!

In the past, summer has not been my favorite tree season. It seemed all the good stuff, those amazing lines, were covered by leaves. So I ignored the trees for the summer and played with other subjects.

This year, I challenged myself to create some summer Treescapes. Could I get to a similar style and feel with blue skies and trees with leaves? After playing around with them for several weeks, I’m figuring it out.

I’ve discovered that in the summer, the Treescapes are more about the light and the leaves than the lines. Maybe that was the key.

This image, Morning’s Gift, is a good example of what I mean. There is that gorgeous morning light, coming through and illuminating the leaves. There is the feeling that the sky is just lightening, the day is just beginning, and it’s going to be a good one. That’s what I wanted to highlight. Let’s go through how I achieved this result.

Starting with this image, from an early morning walk:

I wanted to shift the color a bit, so I pulled it into Mextures, an app I’ve had for a while that I recently rediscovered. They have added lots of new effects! Not only does it have good effects, it’s highly customizable. You can control the amount of the effect, rotate it, change the blending mode and then add more layers. Fun! Leaving the app the image had two Radiance filters and a Grunge texture applied:

Now that I had some nice color shifts going, I wanted to mess it up a bit with an artistic filter. I used the “Benson” effect in Autopainter, one of my go-to effects:

As I started to blend this version back with the original, I found it was getting too dark. I was losing the light. So I pulled the original into Snapseed and lightened it a bit:

And then blended with the Autopainter output, in Image Blender:

It’s getting there! But I wanted mor depth, and depth often comes with more layers. I started playing with it in Distressed FX, and found I liked how this filter warmed it up:

This version and the previous version were blended again in Image Blender:

I’m liking the color, the depth and the way the light comes through at this point. There’s just one tiny problem, some distracting leaves along the top edge. So, back into Snapseed for a little crop:

And it’s done!

You see what I mean about Summer Treescapes? They are all about the light and the leaves. That was the key.

I’m so excited for a gallery full of people, seeing this work, and talking about mobile photography. I look forward to meeting some of the participating artists who are exploring this branch of photography I love so much.

The exhibition contains everything from straight, unedited photographs, to highly edited abstract works. If you can’t attend the exhibition, you can view the show virtually via the slide show here.

It’s been a great experience for me, to see how an exhibition happens from the inside out. I’ll write more about my experiences there later.

For now, I’m going to enjoy the interactions at the reception and the art on the wall. And I’m going to take this moment and seal this lesson into my memory: Our ideas, big or small, can become something real, when we put them out into the world and act on them.

A couple of months ago I wrote about the unexpected opportunity to remodel our kitchen. At the time, we had no usable kitchen and were just dealing with drying out the water from the leak and hadn’t yet decided how to resolve the issue. First things first, right?

Two and a half months later, we have a minimally functional kitchen and a plan for a full remodel. It’s amazing how everything snowballs. One little leak to a full kitchen remodel, flooring through most of the house and a fresh coat of paint through much of it too. It’s also amazing how long everything takes… First sorting out what we wanted to do (minimum fixes or full remodel), then getting the contractor bids, and on to decisions and orders. The decisions have been made, the orders have all been placed. Now we wait.

In the meantime, I thought I would give you a tour of some of the features of our interim kitchen.

Isn’t this a lovely storage unit? We have no water or drain hooked up, so the sink is really just there to plug the hole in the cabinet. We keep our paper and plastic ware stocked there, to keep us from dumping things into the sink. It’s amazing what a habit that is! Since there is no water or drain, we have no dishwasher either. We do our dishes in the bathroom sink. Kind of inconvenient, as it’s down the hall, but my son has learned a useful life skill (washing dishes by hand) so that’s a plus.

Note the charming rustic finish of the window frame above the sink. Also the lovely grey countertops. Folding plastic tables fit perfectly on the cabinets as temporary counters.

We still have use of our cooktop, but the oven is currently unusable. In the effort to get the flooring up to dry out the subfloor, the range was moved and the glass on the oven door broke along with the handle. So we don’t use our oven at the moment, for fear of burning ourselves or our pets. No point in replacing it when you are getting a new gas range in a few weeks, right?

Note also the rustic subfloor look we’ve got going on! Yes, it’s attractive, and matches that rustic window framing. A nice touch, don’t you think? I’m sure it will soon be all the rage.

There is one bright spot in all of this. We got our new refrigerator early, and so we actually have water in the kitchen now, from the water dispenser in the door. What a luxury! I’ve never had such a thing before. We don’t fill up the pasta pot here, but it’s nice to at least have a water source for little things. Like drinking.

It’s not been optimum, but we’ve been making it work. If at the beginning we knew how long everything would take, we might have at least hooked our sink back up, but there’s no point this close to the end.

In about three weeks, the full demo begins and the remodel will truly be underway. We’ll lose our kitchen for a month, which at this point seems inconvenient but not insurmountable. Grill, crockpot, and microwave for cooking. Refrigerator in the garage, water down the hall in the bathroom. What’s a few extra steps to get dinner ready? It doesn’t seem so inconvenient, since we’ve already been living with a partial kitchen for two months.

A kitchen remodel wasn’t in our plans this year, so all of this certainly wasn’t the timing of our choosing, but we have adapted and are muddling through. At the end of all of the work, with a new kitchen, flooring and paint, our house of sixteen years will feel practically brand new. I’m not sure, after four months without a fully functional kitchen, we’ll even quite know what to do.

She would not turn back in fear, not desperately shape herself to fit into old, tightly wedged spaces. She never thought of herself as someone who would do anything other than what was expected of her, yet there was never really an arrival at any fixed point. All that wishing for certainty, all that belief in the clear path always visible up ahead. Here she was with life before her unknown, a reluctant yet inevitable traveler on the path still uncharted.
— Excerpt from Visible City by Tova Mirvis

There was a time in my life I longed for certainty. I made big choices, life choices, based on reducing fear of the unknown. If I could only follow a charted path, get further down the road of expectations, things would be certain. Then I could relax. My younger self was sure of it.

I started my career in a time of uncertainty. In college, my family lost the business that had supported us through most of my childhood. I watched my father cast adrift, trying to figure out what he was going to do with himself without his business to run. I graduated in 1992, the middle of an economic downturn, where jobs were scarce. I was one of the lucky ones with an offer from a good company, a large corporation with a track record for stability.

Things were certain now, right?

Three months after I started there were layoffs. I wasn’t one of the ones who lost their jobs, although I was in fear of it for weeks, until one of the managers told me I was safe. “It would be cruel and unusual punishment,” he said of hiring then firing me in so short a time. Whew, I could breathe again.

Things were certain now, right?

This first job had an interesting demographic. I was the only woman in an engineering department of about 30 engineers. The closest in age to me was 10 years older, the average age was closer to 20-25 years older than me. In my quest for certainty, I looked at those older engineers with envy. They had it all figured out. Good jobs, families grown or nearly so, retirement on the horizon… To my mind, they had it all laid out. I wanted to fast forward to that point.

Things would be certain then, right?

Oh, my poor little younger self, in her quest for certainty. Now that I’m at that point I so longed to be, middle age, I understand just how uncertain life is. There is no path, no course where if you do everything right you will get the prize of absolute stability.

Life happens, life changes. Jobs go away, illnesses happen, loved ones leave us. All of the coworkers who I thought had life figured out had lots more life to live, lots more uncertainty to face, just as I did.

Looking back, I can see how naive I was to want to skip ahead. Life isn’t a destination or a goal that you can shortcut to, it is something to be lived. Something to be experienced, in all of its ranges of emotions and options. It’s the choices we make in the face of uncertainty, in the face of fear, and the lessons we learn from them, that make us whole people. It’s our struggles that make us human.

Fundamentally, uncertainty is what makes life interesting. It’s how we get to shape a life, and a self, that is wholly our own.

Like the character in the Mirvis novel, my younger self faced “life before her unknown, a reluctant yet inevitable traveler on the path still uncharted.” That young, reluctant traveler has, with time and experience, turned into a willing participant in the journey through uncharted territory. She has learned to face her fears and move ahead out of the “old, tightly wedged spaces.”

I have learned there is no certainty in life. That’s what makes it worth living.

I’m back! Did you miss me? My family and I were off last week for some fun in the sun in Leavenworth, Washington.

Before we left my son asked me if this was Travel or Vacation. You see, in our family, we have a different meaning for each word. When we Travel, we are going somewhere to enrich ourselves. We pack our days full of sightseeing and activities. Travel typically involves advance planning, tickets, timetables and lines. Vacation, however, involves sleeping in, lots of reading and loose timetables. We are flexible on what we do, or don’t do, and when. It’s more about relaxation than enrichment.

Last week was definitely Vacation, and I thought I would share a Do’s and Don’ts for a successful vacation based on our week away.

DO go someplace hot, dry and bug-free. 95+ degrees Fahrenheit is good. That way, you have no guilt about laying around reading all afternoon because it’s too hot to do anything else. Naps in air conditioning are prescribed. Visit the pool or the river or both whenever you start to overheat. Stay in your wet swimsuit and air dry all evening as things cool off. (I’m usually cold, so it was awesome to feel hot enough to want to get into the water.)

DON’T go someplace hot, dry and with extreme fire danger if you are intending to hike. There is a good chance all of the trails will be closed so that the officials don’t have to worry about rescuing stranded hikers if they wander into an existing fire area or if a new fire starts. Leave your hiking boots at home. Flip-flops are the only shoes allowed on vacation. (So much for my daily hikes!)

DO have your son, an only child, bring a friend. It is totally worth the extra money you will spend for said friend to join your family. It’s like giving your child the gift of a sibling, only one they’ve chosen, who listens to you, is polite, and willingly helps with chores. All that, and you don’t have to pay for an additional college education! It’s a bargain. With the friend along, you will get more relaxation time in, and keep the surly teenage behavior at bay. (It was lovely!)

DON’T wake anyone up early, especially teenagers. Let them sleep. Everyone will be happier. Let them stay up as late as they want, so they sleep in even later. Spend the cool hours of the morning doing your own thing… Walking the dog, reading, or sleep in yourself. (I would sleep in if I could, but I’m an early riser and enjoy my quiet morning time, even on vacation.)

DO enjoy the touristy, Bavarian-themed town you are staying near. Sample the local merchandise, wander the stores, and maybe actually even buy something for yourself (like a cute skirt). Sit in a beer garden and have a bratwurst and an imported German beer. Daily. (I finally found someone who knew what a Radler was and could make one for me – first time since the real Bavaria!)

DON’T expect fancy museums or educational activities. Visit the local Pioneer Museum with its random collection of artifacts and pioneer buildings, go miniature golfing, float in a tube down the river, visit the local candy-making factory or all of the above. Only one activity per day is allowed. More than that, and it will become Travel. (Ever heard of Aplets and Cotlets? Yes, we saw how they make them. Free samples! Yum!)

DO read lots of books. Four or five, at least. Stock up on books before you leave and enjoy the time guilt-free. Fiction only please, no non-fiction is allowed on vacation. (The best book I read last week was Visible City by Tova Mirvis.)

And here is the kicker, the biggest DON’T of them all…

DON’T, absolutely ever, set your iPhone on a stack of books on the edge of a sink. Especially not a sink with a shallow pool of soapy water in it. Especially not if you plan to leave for 15 to 20 minutes to take the dog for a walk. Because if you do, there is a good chance that when you return, you will find your iPhone in the sink, swimming in the shallow pool of soapy water, flickering ominously. Not only will you lose your phone for the rest of the trip, but you will lose your camera too. (Even after turning it off right away and keeping it in a bag of rice for 3 days, it never recovered. Luckily, we were able to stop at the Apple store in Portland on the drive home and I got my camera, er, phone, replaced. Whew!)

So there you have it, a few Do’s and Don’ts for a successful summer vacation. Do you have any to add to the list? Let’s hear them!